We're Not Running Any More
by Alice the Strange
Summary: Narcissa's always been good at fights. First Harry Potter fic, set post-war. Rated for language and sexual content.


A/N: This is my first ever Harry Potter fanfiction. If it gets a good response, I'm considering turning it into a series – insights into the lives of (fairly) minor characters after the war. "Tom" is an antiquated word for lesbian. That's about everything, really.

Hope you enjoy! :)

* * *

_~ we're not running any more ~_

* * *

Narcissa's always been good at fights.

You wouldn't think it now, of course. She's aged gracefully, the very essence of refinement. Silver-light hair; crows' feet crusted with calico make-up; a statuesque figure that comes from a lifetime of dieting, of wafer biscuits and sipping at cups of exotic tea. During the bad times, during the war, she had shed the womanly curves and become a willow branch, tense as a bowstring, poised to snap.

Her wrists had been twig-thin, then. She remembers being able to close her thumb and forefinger around her bicep, trace the hollows below her cheekbones. She remembers the fear. The urge to lash out, like a cornered animal, to _fight back. _Defend herself with kicks and fingernails and teeth.

But they weren't the sort of people one could fight.

Not if you wanted to live, anyway.

* * *

For her first year at Hogwarts, she had felt as if she were underwater. The lessons drifted around her head like idly floating weeds, catching on nothing. When anyone spoke to her, she would duck her head and pretend she hadn't heard them.

Soon, though, she found an easier way of dealing with it.

Hold that head up high, sniff, glance into the middle distance; all these tricks worked like a charm. That way, she wasn't stupid, wasn't shy or awkward or anything else shameful like that. She just couldn't be bothered to commune with such idiocy. She wasn't interested in friends and she wasn't interested in lovers, because it was beneath her. All of it. The awkward times are, of course, long gone now; she's buried them under layers of _higher-than-you _and _stronger-than-you _and _smarter-than-you. _Narcissa. Narcissus. The old myth of pride.

All right, so maybe. Maybe she's been weak, once or twice, in her time, but that was then and this is now. She got bored of being weak. She got bored of being something she wasn't. She got bored of being alone.

She did her OWLS like a good girl. Scraped a few E's here and there. She was rubbish at everything except fights.

"You'll end up a tom if you aren't careful," her mother predicted cheerfully. Narcissa had growled and pretended not to hear.

No – she had never been a golden girl. Bellatrix was the model daughter. True, Andromeda was book-smart and got the best grades, but she was too soft-hearted and not pretty enough and she _blended into the crowd_, never a trait that was admired amongst the Blacks. But Bella…oh, darling Bella was clever and confident and cocksure, with big dark eyes and a painted mouth that pouted, and she knew just how to twist everyone around her little finger. Next to her, Narcissa was like a faded picture, and she knew it.

She remembers the first time she slapped another girl. The heat of Annie Keldon's skin against her own palm, the resulting gasp of pain that hissed through her satisfactorily like the blade of a knife. The way Annie had thrown herself at her in retaliation, _leapt _on her, and how they'd rolled over, biting, kicking, clawing.

She'd felt so alive then, _evermore_ alive. No longer faded or washed-out or useless. She felt powerful. That white, vulnerable flesh, so easy to twist, to turn dark red and painful. It was only a few minutes before a teacher had waded through the crowd of fascinated onlookers to wrench the two of them apart.

But she'd won, hadn't she?

Yes. She always won.

* * *

She would tell you that he's been in love, if it was the truth. She probably loved the blue-fingered boy in a scholar's gown, with rope-bruises around a neck tender as a peach, who sang the Lacrimosa and had eyes like winter fog. She fought Amycus and then she fucked him, red scrawled on the back of her eyelids, the bells of Magdalen ringing in the distance, but she doesn't think she loved him. She's not even sure if she liked him. Knows only that he made her stomach twist, and her stomach had never twisted before. She does not love Lucius, because he'd never permit such a thing.

If she's honest, she's never loved anyone but Draco. If she's honest, all of her friends are ghosts.

* * *

She visited her parents' house, after the war. It hadn't changed in the slightest – only a little older, a little stiffer, a little mustier – and the same went for her parents. Only now they just looked at her in a slightly dazed fashion, as if wondering why she was still around when their golden girl was gone.

"If only you could have grown up more like your _sister,"_ her mother said wistfully at one point.

Narcissa knew she wasn't talking about Andromeda. "At least I grew up!" she shot back, feeling the anger rising.

"Oh lord!" The arms were waving and the eyes were rolling. "How can she do this to me?"

Bellatrix got all the attention, even dead.

* * *

The world divides into two distinct planes – Life Before, and Life Afterwards. Life Afterwards is greyer, foggy. Minus the pain and fear, but minus everything else as well. She makes her way through it in much the same way she did when she started at Hogwarts – feeling her way through the mist, stumbling on unseen corners. Lost.

She's ten years older than her sister ever managed to be.

"We have to make things different," she says to Lucius, one morning.

He turns a slow gaze from the front page of the Daily Prophet upwards, meeting her eyes. "What exactly do you mean by that?"

She can't in all certainty say. There have always been a lot of thoughts tumbling in her head, and while she's thinking them they're bright and colourful and interesting, and they make _sense – _a form of sense, at least. But when she opens her mouth, they turn to junk, and earn her strange looks. She learned to keep them to herself a long time ago.

But the idea is there still, and she struggles to communicate it. "Everything that happened," she says. "All the…the damage. We've got to undo it. Make things better."

"I don't see why," Lucius says.

Of course he doesn't. She frowns slightly, curving her hands around the cup of tea to heat them. There doesn't initially seem much point, does there? Life is unfair. Always has been. Life is _horribly_ unfair, and you can't change that, not really. She knows people who had a go, and they're dead.

That leaves her, then.

"All the same," she says, "we should try."

Lucius shrugs, returning to the newspaper. "If you must," he replies, disinterestedly. "But I hope you're not expecting me to get involved in your little do-good quest."

She almost laughs, then. "Not in the slightest."

And it's true. She can do this, she thinks; it might be hard, it might take a long time, but she can do _something _for someone other than herself. There aren't too many promises in her life that she's followed through with, but this one is different. Whether she can build a world that will end up good enough, she doubts – but the changes she believes in are the ones she contributes to daily, action by action.

She's always been good at fights.

Narcissa Malfoy lives.


End file.
